We have in this day professed Christians who are so rarefied and etherealized that they do not want a religion of blood.  What do you want?  You seem to want a religion of brains.  The Bible says:  “In the blood is the life.”  No atonement without blood.  Ought not the apostle to know?  What did he say?  “Ye are redeemed not with corruptible things, such as silver and gold, but by the precious blood of Christ.”  You put your lancet into the arm of our holy religion and withdraw the blood, and you leave it a mere corpse, fit only for the grave.  Why did God command the priests of old to strike the knife into the kid, and the goat, and the pigeon, and the bullock, and the lamb?  It was so that when the blood rushed out from these animals on the floor of the ancient tabernacle the people should be compelled to think of the coming carnage of the Son of God.  No blood, no atonement.

I think that God intended to impress us with the vividness of that color.  The green of the grass, the blue of the sky, would not have startled and aroused us like this deep crimson.  It is as if God had said:  “Now, sinner, wake up and see what the Saviour endured for you.  This is not water.  This is not wine.  It is blood.  It is the blood of my own Son.  It is the blood of the Immaculate.  It is the blood of God.”  Without the shedding of blood is no remission.  There has been many a man who in courts of law has pleaded “not guilty,” who nevertheless has been condemned because there was blood found on his hands, or blood found in his room; and what shall we do in the last day if it be found that we have recrucified the Lord of Glory and have never repented of it?  You must believe in the blood or die.  No escape.  Unless you let the sacrifice of Jesus go in your stead you yourself must suffer.  It is either Christ’s blood or your blood.

“Oh,” says some one, “the thought of blood sickens me.”  Good.  God intended it to sicken you with your sin.  Do not act as though you had nothing to do with that Calvarian massacre.  You had.  Your sins were the implements of torture.  Those implements were not made of steel, and iron, and wood, so much as out of your sins.  Guilty of this homicide, and this regicide, and this deicide, confess your guilt to-day.  Ten thousand voices of heaven bring in the verdict against you of guilty, guilty.  Prepare to die, or believe in that blood.  Stretch yourself out for the sacrifice, or accept the Saviour’s sacrifice.  Do not fling away your one chance.

It seems to me as if all heaven were trying to bid in your soul.  The first bid it makes is the tears of Christ at the tomb of Lazarus; but that is not a high enough price.  The next bid heaven makes is the sweat of Gethsemane; but it is too cheap a price.  The next bid heaven makes seems to be the whipped back of Pilate’s hall; but it is not a high enough price.  Can it be possible that heaven can not buy you in?  Heaven tries once more.  It says:  “I bid this time for